Friday, February 27, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: Chris S. Duvall, "Cannabis" (2015)

Clearly written, comprehensive, and rigorously researched, Chris Duvall's Cannabis (London:
Reaktion Books, 2015) is a superb, easily digestable crash course on the
history of the remarkably diverse human-Cannabis
relationship. As one of the few true scholarly histories of the cannabis
plant produced in the last decade, Cannabis
clarifies or refutes many of the widely accepted claims about the plant’s
origins, dispersal, and history found in a wealth of semi-scholarly works.

But the book is much more than a corrective of existing
cannabis literature. Perhaps Duvall’s most important contribution to current conversations
about the plant, scholarly or otherwise, is his observation that people’s diverse experiences with the plant, as well
as the profound symbolism they attach to it, have shaped, complicated, and
confused our understanding of it. This is something that everyone writing or
speaking about cannabis should be aware of, yet Duvall, a geographer at the
University of New Mexico, is the first cannabis writer to dedicate two entire
book chapters to it. Additionally, the book’s framing of the history of
cannabis as a plant instead of a drug (perhaps unsurprising, given its
inclusion in Reaktion’s Botanical series) helps to push cannabis scholarship in
a more honest and valuable direction.

In fewer than 200 pages, Duvall marshals an assortment of
sources in several languages to sweep
the reader around the world not once but twice; he covers the global use
and spread of both primary species of cannabis, sativa (hemp) and indica (drug).
One of Duvall’s major contributions here is emphasizing the under-acknowledged
African contribution to both the dispersal and naming of the plant, especially
in the New World. Noting that “etymologists have barely considered possible
African etymologies” for the plant, he explains the term “marijuana”—the most
popular official word for the plant today—as being a Spanish mispronunciation of
mariamba, a “plural of riamba, meaning ‘cannabis’ in several
Central African Languages” (p. 15).

Cannabis is not
only the history of a human-plant relationship, but also of how the multiple
experiences within that relationship have confounded attempts to understand it.
For example, Duvall notes that “what people mean by any Cannabis term is conditioned by their experience with the plant” (p.
25). “Marijuana aficionados,” he notes, routinely use sativa and indica to
differentiate between drug plants that produce a stimulating or relaxing high,
even though botanically speaking all drug cannabis is indica.Duvall also emphasizes drug cannabis’s historical
association with “labour underclasses,” (p. 155) people whose experiences are often
absent from the historical record and thus only scarcely inform current
understandings of the human-cannabis relationship.

Importantly, though, Duvall also stresses the role of the plantitself in producing such distorted and incomplete understandings
of the plant: “[t]he unusual character of Cannabis—a
cosmopolitan genus with two cryptic
species and two symbolically charged uses—has strongly shaped how people
have generated information about it” (p. 179). Overall, Duvall’s largely botanical treatment of cannabis offers
a more complete view of the plant than other histories, scholarly or not, which
mostly treat it as a drug.[1]

Duvall’s Cannabis joins
Jim Rendon’s Super Charged (2012) and
Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire (2001)
as plant-centric cannabis books written for a broader audience. Yet Duvall’s Cannabis is more comprehensive in its
history and more robust in its documentation, and so helps immensely in the
important task of re-framing the scholarly discussion about cannabis from drug
to plant.

For all its contributions to that scholarly discussion, Cannabis is also brief and highly
readable—a remarkable achievement, given the inherent complexity of the plant
and the cultures surrounding it. Readers will find that Duvall’s book moves at
a brisk and steady pace, riddled with vibrant illustrations and peppered with historical
anecdotes integrated so seamlessly that they bely what was surely an
excruciating research process.

On account of its accessibility, focus on cannabis as a
plant, and upfront grappling with the confusion and myths surrounding the
complex human-cannabis relationship, Duvall’s Cannabis is perhaps the most important scholarly work on the plant
to date.

[1]See Peter Hecht, Weed Land: Inside America’s
Marijuana Epicenter and How Pot went Legit (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2014); Isaac Campos, Home
Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana—Medical, Recreational,
Scientific (New York: Scribner, 2012); Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (New York: Picador, 2003); Larry Sloman, Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana (New
York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1979).